


Halcyon Days

by LLReid



Category: Queen of Thieves (Voltage Visual Novel)
Genre: Canon Lesbian Relationship, F/F, Fluff, Power Couple, The Gilded Poppy, Vienna, dyslexic writer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-22 16:51:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20877515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LLReid/pseuds/LLReid
Summary: Vivienne and her girlfriend enjoy date night — and are totally the couple making out in the middle of the restaurant without caring who can see them.





	Halcyon Days

“This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by.” The sound of Katerina’s voice brought a smile to Vivienne’s face. The soft spoken girl often said things that made her seem older and wiser than her years, that made people sit up straighter and listen. “It does something to your outlook on life,” she continued. “The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table. It’s like drinking, like, I enjoy drinking when I travel. It enhances things, don’t you think?”

“You intrigue me,” Vivienne confessed, as casually as she possibly could given that her heart was racing like a lovestruck teenage girl’s. She was generally a supremely confident person, having learned as a young child that the most confident of women are those who believe in every scrap of fabric they wear. They are the ones who are as happy with their drawers as they are with their gowns. You can tell the difference between a woman who wraps herself in beautiful silks and satins and she who wears...other things. Yet there she was, feeling more like a giddy schoolgirl than a seductress draped in some of the finest stolen rubies and diamonds in the world.

Sitting on the other side of the small table nestled by the window of a five star restaurant in the heart of Vienna, her girlfriend had her absolutely mesmerised without any effort at all. Her poor Katerina was dreadfully jet-lagged and recovering from a winter throat virus that Remy had taken it upon himself to infect the entire Poppy with, yet she was somehow still the most beautiful woman that Vivienne had ever laid eyes upon. Dressed in a haute couture gown the colour of shadows and storm clouds, she was a vision. This was a woman who belonged in haute couture gowns and expensive jewels, not tattered hand-me-downs. This was a woman who brought Vivienne Tang, a world class seductress and master manipulator, to her knees, with one. Single. Look. The fragile-as-glass Dresden doll she used to be back in Paris was long gone. Gone like porcelain turned into steel-made into someone who would always get what she wanted, no matter who or what stood in her way.

To Vivienne she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that she could understand why so many other people were as delightfully disturbed as she by the clicking of Katerina’s heels on the marble floors of world class restaurants around the globe. She’d noticed time and again how often wild hearts would stop and stare as the breeze stirred her rich brown hair, how people went mad with the gold of her laughter. She, herself, had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, and despite having been together for what seemed like an age, she really was acting more and more like a teenager experiencing their first love with each day that passed — and despite the endless teasing from certain members of the Poppy, she surrendered to the intensity of her emotions.

“I’m not that interesting,” Katerina shrugged, waving off the notion of her being seen as anything other than absolutely ordinary. Had she loved her any less it would have been infuriating.

“Funny.” She swirled her expensive red wine around in her crystal glass before taking a long sip, her eyes remaining locked onto the sepia coloured pools glittering in the candlelight from across the table the entire time. “In my experience, people who are genuinely uninteresting don’t ever have to say that.”

Katerina giggled, nervously, like she always did whenever she was the centre of anyone’s attention, a fierce blush rising to her cheeks that she tried to hide by taking a sip out of her own wine glass. Heat bloomed in the centre of Vivienne’s chest at the sound, any time she heard Katerina’s laughter it was like coming home or being born or suddenly finding an entire half of herself that had been missing.

“Tell me a secret,” she prodded.

“What kind of secret?”

“Your deepest, darkest, ugliest secret. One you’ve never told anyone else.”

“I killed someone, once,” the younger woman deadpanned.

“Oh?,” she smirked.

“Buried his body in the backyard. Framed the weird neighbours. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Fuck me yourself, Vivienne.”

The sip of wine in her mouth caught in the back of her throat, laughter rippling through her entire body against her will. “Katya.”

“Vivi.”

“I have half a mind to turn you over my lap and spank the spoiled hell out of you for that,” she smirked.

“My ass is ready.”

“Oh, how surprising.” Beneath the table, Katerina playfully kicked her in the shin, and Vivienne poked her tongue out and winked at her in response. 

“In all honesty, though, I genuinely don’t think I have any deep and dark secrets. I’m a pretty open person who walked the straight and narrow before meeting you guys in New York,” Katerina shrugged. “I spent the first seventeen years of my life doing what everyone around me expected me to do...being what everyone around me has expected me to be. And it's horrid to be someone else's vision of yourself. Then when I disappointed everyone and went off to art school after publicly coming out as bisexual, I continued being that version of myself because I was too scared to make any mistakes and potentially bring even more shame to my family. I haven’t really allowed myself enough freedom to have done anything that I have to keep secret, you know?”

Vivienne reached across the table and took Katerina’s hand in hers — adoring the fact that neither of them wore gloves, loving the way their skin came together, the way hers brought wonderful heat in a lush, irresistible current. “Your blood family don’t deserve you, I hope you know that.”

“So you’ve told me.”

“It’s the truth, cara mia. You are beautiful and brilliant and bold and so very passionate about life and love and those things that you believe in. And you taught me that everything I believed, everything I thought I wanted, everything I had spent my life espousing — all of it...its wrong. I want your version of life...vivid and emotional and messy and wonderful and filled with happiness. If your family can’t accept their brilliant bisexual artist of a daughter for everything that she is, then it’s their loss.” She did a terrible job at masking her desire to throttle the overly religious parents who had suggested putting Katerina through conversion therapy before she had up and left Florida at the first available opportunity. How anyone could willingly put their child through torture was so far beyond the realms of her understanding that it filled her with anger any time she allowed herself to think about it too much. 

Katerina smiled at her, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes. The truth was irrelevant, Vivienne had realised. What is relevant in every situation that life could ever possibly present was only whether or not a person is able to believe it — the mother who had wanted a porcelain doll as a child instead of a free spirited artist and the father who had thought her more possession than person had made it so Katerina was incapable of seeing how amazing she was. They had wanted her to be a pretty, useless ornament who’d always have a man to take care of her, regardless of the fact that was the last thing in the world that Katerina wanted or needed. After it was all over for her girlfriend, the early childhood, a chain of birthdays woven with candlelight, piles of presents, voices of relatives singing and praising her promise and their ideas of what her future should have been, after the years of traditional schooling, fitting herself into different size desks, memorising, reciting, reporting, and performing for jury after jury of teachers, counselors, and administrators, she still felt inadequate, alone, vulnerable, and naked in a world that can be unforgiving and terribly demanding upon those who inhabit it. She masked her pain so well that Vivienne hadn’t even realised how deep it ran until they’d grown close, and no one else had any idea of its existence just below the surface.

“You know, what you did with leaving the safety of your small town and going to art school was really brave. To hell with anyone who tells you otherwise.”

“Brave?”

Vivienne nodded and moved the chair that she was sitting on further around the small circular table, so that she was sitting right at her girlfriend’s side. “Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved here — to Vienna — to live and study...ever see one of his paintings? I mean, you probably have because you went to art school, but I haven’t. Most people haven’t. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.”

She stared deep into her eyes, willing her to understand just how much she loved her. She was all she wanted. She would give everything for her. Without thought. Without regret. 

Katerina understood.

She knew it because coppery eyes sparkled at her, wild as the Austrian rain. She knew it because Katerina whispered her name, aching and beautiful and soft enough for only her to hear.

Vivienne’s right hand rose, capturing her girlfriend’s jaw and titled her face up to her even as she leaned down and stole her lips and breath and thought in a kiss that she would never in her lifetime forget. It was like food and drink, like sleep, like breath. She needed it with the same elemental desire and she cared not a bit that they were in the middle of a restaurant.

Their fingers still intertwined, she wrapped their arms behind her back and pulled her to her, claiming her mouth with lips and tongue and teeth, marking her with one long luscious kiss that went on and on until she thought she might die from the pleasure of it. Her free hand was in her hair then, tangling in the soft locks, loving their silky promise. 

She was lost, claimed and fairly consumed by the intensity of the kiss, and Vivienne gave herself up to emotion, pouring every bit of her desire and her passion and her fear and her need into this moment this caress.

This woman.

This woman, who was everything she had never allowed herself to dream she would find.

This woman, who made her believe in friendship. In partnership..in love.

In that very moment it seemed almost as if the decades marked by disdain for emotion could have been nothing more than a faint memory in her checkered past. That somebody actually loved her enough despite having seen the worst of her to have proven to her that the world was worth her caring, her trust. That Katerina’s patience and kindness was helping her turn herself into the woman of whom she had dreamed of being for so long.

The woman that she had portrayed herself as for most of her adult life, had never actually been real. The perfect life she had portrayed herself as having was actually crashing bore, she had realised. Perfect is too clean, too easy. She no longer craved perfection any more than she wanted to be perfect. She wanted the imperfect. She’d never been the strong and silent lesbian Odysseus; never as mysteriously aloof or powerful and passionate as she thought that she had been. She had only ever been Vivienne, arrogant and flawed and altogether flesh and blood.

“Thank you,” Katerina whispered.

“For what?”

“For making me feel better. You’re getting good at that.”

Vivienne smiled. “All I did was remind you that blood ties are not supposed to be chains.”

“You did much more than that.” The younger woman shook her head and gently brushed her thumb over Vivienne’s lower lip, the very part that she tended to bite down on whenever she got nervous. The way she was looking at her almost knocked the wind right out of her — no one had ever looked at her that way. She would have drowned in that gaze, if given half the chance. How much she cared for her was always conveyed through her eyes, regardless of anything else — the eyes never learn how to lie.

“Red,” she giggled, burying her face into the thick curtain of her hair. The dusky and faintly sweet smell of her perfume came to her, a smell suggestive of dark silk, that was hers alone, like the smell of a rare flower. “What on earth are you doing to me?! I am not usually this swooning, easily flustered type of person!”

“Darling,” Katerina teased, “that’s just what being loved throughly will do to you.”

“You’re mine.” She kissed her lips once again, slow and sweet. “I hope you know that I don’t intend on ever letting you go.”

“Gonna tie me up and keep me in your bedroom forever?”

“Only if you misbehave,” she smirked, resting her brow against her’s.

“What are you offering now?,” Katerina asked suspiciously. 

“Just me, my friendship. Just me, and the now-and-then right to kiss you, hold your hand, touch your hair, and take you to the movies, and listen to your dreams because you listen to mine, and be silly once in a while. You know, doing all the things that will build a past we’ll enjoy remembering when we’re eighty and senile and attempting to rob The Louvre despite the fact we’re decrepit and driving around on those motorised scooters — that’s all.”

“I will beat you with my walking stick and then run you over with my motorised scooter if you think I’m robbing The Louvre with you at eighty.”

“Oh, you’re not getting your own. You’ll sit in the basket of mine, wrapped up in a fluffy blanket and dripping in diamonds — like ET.” A surge of pride made Vivienne sit up a little straighter as Katerina doubled over giggling. She didn’t hide her face as she laughed, like she had done for the first few months that Vivienne had known her — the shy part of her had long since melted away. She no longer convinced herself that if she hid her face people couldn’t see her just because she couldn’t see them, and it was perhaps Vivienne’s most favourite change she’d seen take root. 

“You seem to have given this a lot of thought.”

“I am nothing if not organised.”

“And oddly attached to a fictional space alien.”

“It’s a good movie. A true classic.”

“You’re so extra.” She took a long sip of her wine, draining the very last drop of the rich red liquid after swirling it expertly around in her glass. Vivienne could feel nothing but how loved she was, her girlfriend’s unbridled affection as plain as the nose on her face.

“That makes no sense.”

“Because you’re old and needed me to explain to you what it meant.”

Playfully, Vivienne kicked her in the shins beneath the table, without caring that they were in a five star restaurant. Had anyone else to call her old she would not have hesitated to poison them, but thank goodness — for Katerina’s sake — that she was even more endearing than normal whilst tipsy. “I’m not that much older than you!”

“Yet you needed me to explain to you what extra meant. It’s alright, no one else got it either. People over twenty-three just shouldn’t try.”

“It is a good thing you’re pretty.”

“That’s gay.”

“You are the most irritating person I have ever met,” Vivienne huffed, but somehow the words came out too soft...too tender, and ended up sounding like a compliment.

“Love you, too, babe,” Katerina smirked. She put her hands on either side of Vivienne’s face, and the restaurant fell away. It was so easy to get lost in her, the space between them exploding. Her heart kept on missing beats and her hands could not bring her close enough to her. When she tasted her it was so easy to realise that she had been starving her entire life. 

She had loved before, but it hadn’t felt the way it did with Katerina.

She had kissed many beautiful women before, but it hadn’t burnt her alive. 

Time became irrelevant and she hadn’t the slightest idea how long their kiss had lasted for. It could just as easily been an hour as it could have been a minute — but as they parted, it felt like all she knew was that kiss. All she could focus on was how soft her skin was when it brushed against hers. 

Women love each other like animals. There was something ferocious and entirely unself-conscious about it, and that made it so exciting. Having never been trained to be on guard the same way they are with men, it made it all the more intimate. They loved with claws and teeth and the blood was just proof of how much. It was utterly feral — and absolutely relentless.

Vivienne found it funny, most people can be around someone and they gradually begin to love them and never know exactly when it happened; but she knew the very second it happened to her. When Katerina had smirked at her beneath the Parisian sunset she had realised that her attraction to her was the real thing. All those feelings that she had been trying to hold back came flooding through her, and it was at that second in time that she knew she loved Katerina with all her heart. 

It would be Katerina, in a thousand penthouses glittering above a thousand cities, in foreign countries where they would be together, in heaven and in hell. And she didn’t have to stop and think, or ask if it was right, no one had to tell her, because for the first time things could not have been more right or perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven’t been working recently and have had to defer my university work for a year due to side effects from chemo, so I’ve been writing a lot. I have so many of these one shots that I’ll eventually post. I’ve written ones for Aurora, Helena, Altea, Iraia, Onyx, Medusa, Scylla, and Runa so far. Let me know what you guys think of this one/which ones you’d like me to post next x


End file.
